Alan Kay Demos GRaIL
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as proof that the 1960s already had modeless, sketch-based interfaces that remain impressive today.
What it is
Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec some-mthfka · 2023-01 · on “Emacs Is Not Enough”
Man, I love these old demos. And I haven't seen this one before. I now understand much better what Alan Kay meant when he said: I felt like sticking my hands right through the display and actually touching the information structures directly. This is the first system I have used, and practically the only one since that I would call truly intimate. [1] Thanks for this link. Well, in terms of UI, I see no problem whatsoever in building such a workflow. The way it will work is: lenses (aka editors) are cells (aka widgets). So you will be able to position things freely, anywhere. You could even connect and see actual symbols get imported and such. As for the CL side, unimporting a symbol (aka re
Recommends colllectorof · 2017-11 · on “Magic Paper”
This line of thinking goes back even further. Back to 1968 when GRAIL was developed: [this video] Pretty amazing stuff, even today.
Cites some1else · 2016-03 · on “Show HN: Interactive, Visual Explanation of the GRAIL Handwriting Recognizer”
Thanks for this wonderful essay! I love learning about that period in computing, when a lot of what we use today was first challenged. It's easy to see how those same principles apply to the GRaIL visual programming interface demo[1], where different strokes create different types of elements (boxes, outputs, connections, ...). [1]: [this video]
Cites ken · 2019-03 · on “Loopy: a tool for thinking in systems (2017)”
I love it! It's like the simulations of iThink [1], with the "analogic" sketching UI of GRaIL [2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [this video]
Cites jcelerier · 2020-02 · on “Max/MSP: A visual programming language for music and multimedia”
> Languages like these also don't have the almost hundred years of research and effort in to creating an ecosystem around them like text-based languages do. c'mon, the first dataflow languages date from the 60s, that's barely after the first textual PLs - see eg [this video] > There's no way to harness the incredible power of text editors like vim or emacs. have fun showing most art students how to use vim or emacs :p just typing a few commands in a console to build a project is already a galore from past teaching experience.
Cites jancsika · 2025-10 · on “Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)”
If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for ? :) You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history. (In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.) Edit: just so I get the right incanta